A Pound of Flesh: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (3 page)

Cade paused outside of the steel door and
tried to quiet his inner voice—the repetitious droning chant that
demanded revenge, all the while valiantly fighting the desire to
march in and end it all here and now. Standing there with E-4
Croswell’s eyes burning a hole in his back, he came to the
conclusion that he would be battling these urges until Pug had
drawn his last stolen breath. That he had lied to keep his name off
of the ledger baffled the hell out of him.
What the hell was I
thinking? Just kill the fucker and waltz right out, hoping the anal
E-4 wouldn’t intervene. What then, Grayson...kill him too to cover
it up?
Trying to distance himself from his momentary character
shift and mental lapse of judgment, he opened the heavy steel
security door. Cade’s entrance elicited a wan smile from the man
who called himself Pug. The two were far from strangers. The night
before, after the man had been captured, Cade had been given
immediate access to him. Back-to-back fifteen second waterboarding
sessions had failed to elicit any information, not his real name,
not where he came from, who sent him, nor if there were more
saboteurs or agents inside of Schriever. After Pug’s third
introduction to simulated drowning, he divulged only his name and
that he had left Jackson Hole two days prior—the rest of his story
still remained a mystery.

The fact that the prisoner had weaseled his
way onto the base in the company of four other survivors, with a
hidden weapon, pointed to some semblance of intelligence. That the
man nonchalantly walked back to the civilian tents after his
murderous rampage, leaving a perfect trail of wet footprints for
the security personnel to follow, was, to say the least, very hard
to fathom.
Was it a mental lapse on the killer’s part,
Cade
asked himself,
or had he wanted to be caught

Pug had spent the last few hours marinating
under the sterile white light bulbs. By design, the air was frigid
due to the constantly running air conditioner. Comfort was now a
thing of the past for the murderer, and Cade was going to see to it
that the man would spend each minute from here on out wishing he
were dead.

“I have a question for you, big man. Why did
you intervene and save the other survivors?” Cade said, letting the
question hang.

Manacles clanking, Pug shifted in his seat.
Then he bent at the waist, stretching across the table to massage
his swollen face with his cuffed hands.

“Did you save those people because you like
teen girls? Or do you like ‘em younger? I have a daughter, she’s
eleven... gonna be twelve real soon.” Cade paused, again waiting
for a response. He wanted to find a crack. Anything to get the
dialogue flowing. The
real
physical pain would be applied as
a last resort. Cade had a promise to keep and he knew that once he
started, nothing was going to keep him from finishing the job.

The killer slowly moved the chain along the
affixed bar that bisected the center of the table top as he stared
at his blurred reflection in the brushed stainless steel.
Don’t
talk
, the voice counseled.

“Too bad the prison system isn’t what it used
to be. They’d adopt a
Short Eyes
like you in a New York
second. You’re a small guy... you’d be real easy to pass around.
Like a party favor. They’d have their way with you until you were
worn out and broken. You would enjoy that wouldn’t you?”

Don’t let him talk to you like that Pug.
Stepdad did that to me... we would never hurt a kid. Don’t let the
fucker call you Short Eyes. Bash his face in.

Cade waited for a response.

Nothing.

“I know you came here with a group... but you
were really alone. The redhead and her brother... they told us that
they met you for the first time on I-25. Said you came out of
nowhere, gun blazing. Said that you saved them like some kind of
super hero.”

Cade was no dummy. This Pug bastard was
crafty—he’d give him that. Stalking them and watching from afar.
Waiting for the opportune moment to insert himself into the
equation—brilliant.

As soon as Pug heard the words
super
hero
the demon lurking in his brain couldn’t resist the urge to
sing its theme song.
Here I come to save the dayyy.

“I know who sent you.” Cade crouched on his
haunches to look the man in the eye. “Pug... Robert Christian sent
you here.”

No recognition.
Cade had hoped to see
some sort of expression, however small. He kept probing.

“I want to know who helped you after you got
here. Little runt like you couldn’t have pulled the whole thing off
by yourself. Someone on this base provided you with the gun.” He
already knew how the gun had been smuggled in; the security
personnel had found the ruptured Camelbak bladder in Pug’s tent. He
was trying to chip away at the man’s self-esteem, which from the
looks of him was probably on the low side. A person like that, Cade
knew, could be malleable and easily persuaded with the proper
motivation.

Pug smiled and said, “I’m just a traveler—a
survivor.”
Here I come to save the day
.

The arrogance masked behind the smile wasn’t
lost on Cade. He walked behind the prisoner, and after counting to
ten Mississippi delivered an open handed roundhouse to the left
side of Pug’s head. “Wipe the fucking smile off of your face. The
kids’ stories match up—no

discrepancies. Their names are in the Denver
yellow pages,” Cade bellowed. “Then we looked into Ted Keller’s
background. He lived in the same building as the siblings. His name
is also in the phone book like the others. It turns out you killed
Ted’s partner in the infirmary.”

“I knew they were
fags
,” Pug sneered.
That wasn’t in the script
, the voice cried.

Cade lashed out with another open handed
roundhouse, catching Pug across the opposite ear and starting it
bleeding. The blow produced a stark white hand print.

A look of shock lit up the prisoner’s flat
face.

“I didn’t do it,” he croaked. “I’m just a
traveler trying to survive.” Then he spat. The bloody globule
slapped the floor near Cade’s boots.
Get us out of here
, the
all too familiar voice urged.

“Very few people on this base even know
you’re here, and once you talk—
because you will talk
,
everyone does
eventually
—I’m going to
kill
you.”

Pug opened his good eye and said, “Francis is
already dead. Dad killed him.”
You don’t tell him
anything.

“Pug or whatever the fuck your name is, I’m
going to Jackson Hole and I
will
find out who you really
are. I’m going to find out who sent you here, bring them back with
me—have a little fun—and then kill them too.”

Pug launched out of his seat as far as the
restraints allowed and bellowed, neck veins bulging, “Good luck
with that!”
Calm down and wait. Have faith. We will get out of
here,
one of the more rational voices soothed. In a moment of
clarity Pug suddenly doubted the familiar voices in his head. He
wished that he hadn’t left his pills in the obscene marble bathroom
in the dead Denver Nugget’s mansion. It was too late for wishing
now.

For a schizo like Pug, once the voices took
over, short of a medical intervention there was no going back.

Cade was pissed to say the least. He wanted
to glean all he could so he might start the wheels of justice
grinding. Secure some vengeance for his dead friend Mike Desantos.
Not only had this waste of skin murdered Carl, he had also killed
Doctor Fuentes and Jessica Hanson and then burned the entire
research tent to the ground along with all of the
equipment—including the computers and the data stored on their hard
drives. Cloud storage and the Internet were things of the past in
this zombie-plagued world. The few doses of effective lifesaving
antiserum that remained went up in the inferno. Pug’s actions had
effectively signed General Desantos’ death warrant, depriving Annie
Desantos of a husband, his three kids of a father and Cade of his
best friend. He wanted more than anything to put a boot to the
fucker and a blade in his black heart, and after the trail of death
and destruction the man calling himself Pug had left in his wake
the night before, a good beating and a quick death would be letting
him off easy. As a matter of fact he deserved no less than a
million lifetimes of agony as payback for the innocents he had
murdered in cold blood and the lives he had forever altered.

Pug’s face never changed from the expression
of detached amusement he had been wearing since the second brutal
slap, and he didn’t move a muscle as Cade’s mouth hovered inches
from his ear. “After I’m finished with the vermin in Wyoming I am
coming back here to exterminate you.”

Cade exited the room without a backward
glance. He snatched the ledger out of Croswell’s hands, signed in
and then promptly signed out.

Airman Croswell shot the operator a quizzical
look.

“That fucker in there... he’s still
breathing. And that means it’s no longer our secret that I dropped
by,” Cade said as he stalked out of the room.

Croswell watched the door slam shut behind
the captain and then waited until he was certain that the pissed
off officer wasn’t returning. Then he peered in the window to
confirm the captain’s claim. The scene inside caused him to drop
the clipboard once again and bolt into the interrogation room.

Chapter 3

Outbreak - Day 10

NORAD Complex

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

The living dead pressing against the razor
wire-topped fence began arriving days ago, shortly after the
President’s Osprey landed for the first time just outside the
entrance to the old NORAD facility.

Located within Cheyenne Mountain, the super
secure complex consisted of tunnels and bunkers which were carved
into the solid granite deep enough to withstand a direct nuclear
blast. Cheyenne Mountain had originally been selected to house the
North American Air Defense Command because of its structural
integrity and its close proximity to both Schriever Air Force Base,
twenty miles to the northeast, and downtown Colorado Springs, just
a stone’s throw to the North.

After having its command and control
transferred to Peterson Air Force Base, the Cheyenne Mountain
Complex had been placed on a warm standby status. Luckily for the
President, the Air Force personnel had the dusty facility up and
running hours after she had reclaimed it as her own.

Valerie Clay sat alone in the darkened war
room watching the grisly image splashed across the eight
wall-mounted flat panels. The combat command center had once been
filled with airmen and officers whose sole job it was to monitor
the entire northern hemisphere and provide an early warning in case
of a Soviet Union nuclear first strike.

Clay watched as the monsters in the front of
the crush were being slowly compressed through the heavy gauge wire
fencing. Jostling for position behind them, the hundred plus
zombies were driven by one impulse—to get at the meat they knew was
somehow associated with the noisy machine.

The President sat in the dimly lit room not
at all concerned about the abominations assembled outside—it was
the untold millions of migrating dead that the satellites had been
tracking from space with their high powered cameras that caused her
the greatest concern. If the fence failed—and it would eventually—
the second line of defense would contain them long enough for her
protection detail to hustle her out to Marine One and away to
safety. In the days since the facility was chosen to serve as the
new White House, Clay’s secret service detail, with the help of
soldiers from Fort Carson, had brought in the twenty shipping
containers which now encircled the makeshift grass landing pad.
Stacked two high, the two-ton steel rectangular boxes weighed
enough to keep the throng of dead from displacing them and were too
tall for the creatures to climb over. Although a tight fit because
of the Osprey’s twin tilt rotors, the President’s bird still had
sufficient clearance for takeoff and landings.

President Clay ran her fingers through her
shoulder length black hair. The last time she dared look in a
mirror she had noticed an abundance of new ‘grays’ no doubt brought
on by her rapid ascension to the office of President and the toll
two short weeks of hell had taken on her.

Mount Saint Helens, Mount Rainier and the
Gifford Pinchot wilderness area of her home state of Washington had
been on her mind all morning. Missed were the fragrant tall pines,
clean air, and abundant wildlife.

Screw the radiation
, she said to
herself. This was no way to live; cooped up with a million tons of
rock parked directly over her head made her feel no different than
one of those things on the monitor. No—she was still alive—and she
had made up her mind.

She called in her senior Secret Service Agent
Adam Cross. The former Special Forces operator, with multiple
combat deployments under his belt, had been on her protection
detail since she was Speaker of the House. Now as President of the
United States her armed entourage had doubled in size, surrounding
her everywhere she went. Agent Cross was fiercely loyal. He would
not only take a bullet for her, the tall blonde shooter would also
get in the way of a Z bite for her.

The President sprang her ambush the second
Agent Cross entered the low-ceilinged war room. “I’ve thought this
over six ways from Sunday,” she said confidently. “I’m going to
go... I can still make it in time if we hustle. Get the flight crew
ready, I want to be wheels up in five—
that is an order
.”

Cross hailed the Osprey crew who were suited
up and standing by on Alert 5—which meant they were ready to go and
could be airborne in less than five minutes. The Marine Major and
the rest of her four-man crew jumped at once and were in the
elevator heading to the surface in under a minute.